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Here's an example of the font Dyslexie.

A Dutch graphic artist claims he's created a font that can make reading easier on dyslexics. Christian Boer, diagnosed with dyslexia himself when he was 4, thinks the pot-bellied “b” and the barrel-chested “d”  in Dyslexie, the font he designed, helps people with his learning disability read better.

Some of the letters in his san-serif font appear to be a bit tipsy. The”j” is slightly askew, the better to distinguish it from the “i.” The “c” opens really wide, to minimize the possibility it would be confused with the “e.” The “b,” which looks like it might want to lay off the beer, leans forward a tad, while the “d,” which looks like it’s been lifting weights, leans back. In commonly used fonts, of course, the two letters are mirror images.

Dyslexie “is gaining popularity because people with dyslexia see/experience that it works,” Boer says via email.

As evidence, Boer cites an experiment done by a Dutch grad student named Renske de Leeuw. De Leeuw compared Dyslexie and the font Arial in 21 students with dyslexia and 22 students without it.  In his master’s thesis last December, de Leeuw wrote that dyslexics overall made fewer errors while reading Dyslexie, although their speed did not increase.

Reviews by the dyslexics in his study were mixed, de Leeuw wrote in his thesis: “The experimental font looks messy, like someone should buy a new printer,” one said. “The letters are much clearer!” said another.

Dyslexia researcher Sally Shaywitz is skeptical, to say the least. For one, Shaywitz said, an unpublished master’s thesis isn’t exactly solid scientific evidence.

 “As a scientist, I go by evidence and data, and I’m not aware of any” to support the notion that a special font — and there are others besides Dyslexie, such as “Lexia Readable”— improves reading ability in dyslexics.

One reason, Shaywitz tells audiences around the country, is “it’s not about ‘b’ and ‘d.’”

Shaywitz, a physician who co-directs the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, ought to know. She has has published more than 200 scientific articles, chapters and books about dyslexia, including the bestselling book "Overcoming Dyslexia."

She points out that dyslexia is not a visual problem: Dyslexics have trouble matching the letters they see on the page with the sounds those letters and combinations of letters make, her center's says. “Reversing letters is not a sure sign of dyslexia; a child can be highly dyslexic and NOT reverse letters.”

Do you have dyslexia, or do you know someone with the learning disability? What do you think about a specially designed font like Dyslexie?

Related:

• Who is this?! Dyslexics can't ID voices, study shows
• Bad at math? Or is it dyscalculia?

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Recognizing written words is tough enough for people with dyslexia. But a new study suggests the disorder might also make it harder to recognize the voices of people as they speak.

Although dyslexia is regarded as a reading disability, it might be more accurate to think of it as a language disability, the authors say.

People with dyslexia are thought to have difficulty connecting the sound of words with their meaning, so the MIT researchers theorized that their ability to identify speakers’ voices might be impaired. After all, one key component of distinguishing speakers’ voices is how they pronounce words.

To test that hypothesis, they recruited college students with and without dyslexia whose hearing was fine.

The researchers tested their ability to recognize speakers in their native English and in a completely foreign language, Chinese.

“People have shown before that you do better at recognizing voices in a language you know than in a language you don’t know,” says senior author John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist.

If you don’t have dyslexia, that is.

In each language, participants first learned to associate five talkers’ voices with unique cartoon avatars and then were tested on their ability to identify those voices.

So as not to provide any clues that would increase participants’ chances of correctly matching the avatars to the voices, all of the speakers were young men without obvious accents.

When asked to identify the English-speakers, Gabrieli and his coauthors reported July 29 in Science, the people with dyslexia were wrong half the time—much worse than the people who weren’t dyslexic, who missed only 30 percent.

Chinese was another matter. Study participants with dyslexia performed just as poorly when trying to identify the Chinese-speakers as they did with the English-speakers. But this time, the people who weren’t dyslexic missed as many as those with dyslexia. They couldn’t recognize any words, so they couldn’t identify the Chinese speakers on the basis of their pronunciation.

The dyslexic student’s impaired ability to recognize voices was interesting but didn’t present a big problem in their daily lives, Gabrieli says. Oh, sure, he talked to a dyslexic BBC reporter who liked to listen to radio serials and got frustrated trying to figure out which character was speaking. But the woman is a BBC reporter, so she’s not doing too badly.

This line of research could lead to detecting dyslexia in children before they even know how to read, Gabrieli says, noting “there is evidence that early intervention is much more effective than later intervention.”

He and his coathors are now using functional MRI imaging to see whether the brains of people with dyslexia look different that the brains of people without it while trying to name that voice.

How are you at recognizing voices? Can you easily place the celebrity voiceover in a commercial or the latest animated feature?

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